China lauds solved murder rate, denies torture

BEIJING, May 16 (Reuters) Chinese police had a better rate of success at cracking murder cases last year than either the United States or Britain, officials said on Monday, strongly denying that forced confessions were behind the good results.

Of the more than 30,000 murder cases in China in 2005, almost 90 percent were solved, and the number of people murdered per 100,000 of the population was only just over 2, far less than the 5.6 figure in the United States, police officials said yesterday.

In the United States, 63 per cent of murder cases were cracked, they said.

The credit was due to good police work under the slogan adopted in 2004 of ''homicide cases must be broken,'' said He Ting, head of the public security ministry's criminal investigation department.

''The campaign has been greatly successful,'' He told a news conference. ''It was due to the blood and sweat of a million police and security people.'' In recent years, China has come under pressure not only from foreign rights groups and the United Nations but also an increasingly feisty domestic media to crack down on forced confessions and torture after several infamous cases.

Last year, China freed a man who spent 11 years in jail for allegedly murdering his wife after the woman turned up alive.

The man, She Xianglin, said he had confessed to the crime under torture.

In another case, the children of a Chinese butcher executed for murdering a waitress appealed against his conviction after his ''victim'' turned up alive.

He said such cases were very rare.

''Over the past few years we have taken measures against the practice of forced confessions. Such cases are happening less and less now,'' he said.

''It is not a serious problem,'' He added, though he declined to say if any incidents had come to light recently, or what action was taken against police found to have used torture.

Late last year, Manfred Nowak, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, said suspects in China were routinely beaten and that police were under heavy pressure to extract confessions.

The Chinese government angrily rejected Nowak's comments, but has in the past recognised there was a problem, last year passing a bill mandating punishment for police who torture detainees during interrogation.

He said interrogations were recorded and prosecutors operated independently of police, asking detainees to sign papers saying they were not forced into confessing crimes.

''Police chasing homicide cases must guarantee the quality of their work and be impartial, enforcing the law and punishing criminals and certainly not wronging innocent people,'' He said.

But he admited there was still a problem solving murders in certain areas, mainly in the poor, rural northwest and western parts of the country, where police could also not guarantee interrogations would be recorded.

''The country is very big, economic development uneven and police resources are limited,'' he said.

REUTERS SI SND1120